A pilot study was carried out to investigate the possibility of helping Dutch pupils, who were weak in comprehending English texts, by teaching them certain explicit problem solving strategies. These strategies were part of a heuristic which was based on concepts from cognitive and metacognitive theory. The heuristic was demonstrated to the pupils on computer by means of a number of English texts. Twelve pupils from a VWO-5 class took part in the study. The training lasted for five weeks and every week the problem solving strategies were demonstrated using a new English text. As a result of the training, the pupils used certain (problem solving) strategies more often. These strategies were already known to them, but were seldomly used. They did not learn any strategies of which they had no prior knowledge. The pupils performed much better on a posttest for reading comprehension.